IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamest/v44y1993i1p10-18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Belief Function Model for information retrieval

Author

Listed:
  • Wagner Teixeira da Silva
  • Ruy Luiz Milidiú

Abstract

The Belief Function Model for automatic indexing and ranking of documents with respect to a given user query is proposed. The model is based on a controlled vocabulary, like a thesaurus, and on term frequencies in each document. Descriptors in this vocabulary are terms chosen from among their synonyms to be used as index terms. A descriptor can have a subset of broader descriptors, a subset of narrower descriptors, and a subset of related descriptors. Thus, descriptors are not mutually exclusive and naive probabilistic models are inadequate for handling them. However, a belief function can still be defined over a thesaurus of descriptors. Belief functions over the descriptors can represent a document or a user query. We can compute the agreement between a document belief function and a query belief function. Therefore, we propose that the set of documents be ranked according to their agreement with the given user query. We show that the Belief Function Model is wider in scope than the Standard Vector Space Model. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Suggested Citation

  • Wagner Teixeira da Silva & Ruy Luiz Milidiú, 1993. "Belief Function Model for information retrieval," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 44(1), pages 10-18, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:44:y:1993:i:1:p:10-18
    DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199301)44:13.0.CO;2-V
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199301)44:13.0.CO;2-V
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199301)44:13.0.CO;2-V?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jinfang Wang, 2010. "A universal algebraic approach for conditional independence," Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Springer;The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 62(4), pages 747-773, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:44:y:1993:i:1:p:10-18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.